Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) are useful for taking people out of harm's way. Although there have been many advances in using these vehicles, one of the key areas that is currently lacking is the poor situational awareness provided to operators.
Military operations in urban areas often involve action in unknown environments such as buildings, tunnels, streets, and alleys. Having access to advanced intelligence in the area of operation increases the preparedness the soldiers when the operation begins. However, conducting “sweeps” of unknown areas can results in casualties and fatalities for warfighters. Additionally, a soldiers' ability to successfully complete a mission is frequently impaired by a lack of information about a structure and/or the locations of potentially hostile individuals within that structure. A robotic mapping system that provides a realistic, high-resolution three-dimensional graphics database that clearly depicts and geo-locates the interior and exterior of a building, prior to soldiers entering the structure, provides a significant benefit to ground forces.
When a robot maps the building, tools are needed in order translate the raw data to an easy-to understand visualization display for the operator. This output must represent the environment, within which a small UGV traveled, in an intuitive and easily-understood way. A widely-used visualization tool consists of viewing a video stream from a platform's camera. However, with a video stream, the user cannot easily change perspective, zoom, follow the image frames in an order other than that with which they were captured, or gain a sense of depth for objects within the image. Moreover, video imposes high bandwidth requirements. A strong visualization tool creates a very realistic representation of the environment that the user can navigate in any way desired.